Q. Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss?
A. Yes. I was 16 and I started at this restaurant in the summer even before it opened. I was digging holes for the fence out front and picking up restaurant supplies. I was just the gofer. Once the restaurant opened, I became a daytime prep cook. And three weeks into it, they fired the executive chef and put me in charge of the line cooks, who were probably 10, 15 years older than me. So that was my first experience with management.
Q. And so was that an easy transition for you?
A. It kind of just felt normal and natural. I think that being an only child, it’s easier to manage people because you’re used to being the only one — you’re top of the food chain because there is no chain. So to manage people, it’s just a natural progression.
Q. What about after that?
A. I started making balloon animals at T.G.I. Friday’s. A company would pay the restaurant to have me go there, and then I’d make balloon animals and entertain the kids and I’d work for tips. Then I realized that the lady who runs the company that hired me lives in Arizona. So I teamed up with somebody and approached all the T.G.I. Friday’s in the area and said: “Why don’t you pay us to do it? We’ll control it locally.” So then I managed 10 people who were going around to all these different restaurants — and I was 17 years old. Then somebody kept offering me a job to work in selling mobile phones — this was when digital phones were first coming out.
Q. Who was doing that?
A. It was the people in this store I went into to buy something for my cellphone because they were so surprised that — this was before 10-year-olds had cellphones — there was this 17-year-old kid who had a cellphone. They asked me why I needed it. “Well, I have to schedule my employees,” I told them. And they said, “Oh, we want this guy to work for us.” They just kept calling, “Come work for us. Come work for us.” So finally, I said, “All right, I’ll try this.” So I got into B2B [business to business] sales at 17.
Q. All while you’re going to school?
A. No, I dropped out of school when I was 16. I have a ninth-grade education. But I was getting pretty big customers. I would pay one of my friends to cut school and come with me to the city and we’d go into a hospital, and we’d sneak up to the top floor and we’d put fliers in the interoffice mailboxes from the top floor to the bottom floor about a special deal for hospital employees. And my phone was ringing for orders before we were even walking out of the building, because this was when there weren’t cellphone stores on every single corner. Then I started to get sick of going out and getting customers. So, I figured, why don’t I open up a store and just sit there and have people come to me? So I opened a store right when I turned 18, and I grew that to about 12 stores before I was 20.
Q. You were obviously making a lot of money at a young age.
A. I bought a 3,600-square-foot house when I was 19. My friends who would come over would wonder when my parents were coming home. “No, they’re never coming home,” I said to them. “This is mine.”
Q. Then what?
A. I built up the network of stores, then sold them off individually. After that, I started a company that wholesaled mobile phones. I did that for about two years and the company did really well, with more than $35 million in revenue. But then I realized that the more money that you make, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re happy. I said to myself: “I don’t do anything. I don’t have any hobbies. All I do is work. This is stressful. Yeah, I have this company, but I want to be a kid.” So I called up some people in the industry that I knew and told them, I want to them take over the company and just pay me royalties.
I decided I was really going to try to relax and get out of work mode, so I sold my house and got into shape. I took up cycling. I rode 30 miles a day, six days a week. I got into kiteboarding and traveled all over for two and a half years. All I did was have fun. I took not working like a job. I’d wake up, I’d ride my bike. I’d go on vacation every two weeks. It was the best two and a half years of my life.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=335bc52c0a9784ebaadfd422d5df9865
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